The present invention relates to a vinyl polymer having (meth)acryloyl groups on the side chains which can be used as a material for making a variety of polymeric materials highly multi-functional and highly efficient as well as a method for preparing the same.
There have been used a variety of polymeric materials in a wide variety of fields along with the recent marked progress in polymer industries. In particular, there have been conducted the development of more excellent materials over recent several years in order to satisfy the recent requirements for the improvement in quality, performance and functionality of industrial products.
Under such circumstances, (meth)acrylic monomers have widely been used in the fields of, for instance, paints, gluing agents, adhesives, inks, fiber-processing agents and synthetic resin plates because of their high reactivity, kinds of new (meth)acrylic monomers have likewise recently been increased year by year in proportion to the industrial importance thereof and the molecular weight of these monomers has also been increased along with the diversity in applications thereof. For instance, there have been known a series of polymers having a relatively low molecular weight of the order of about 1000 to several tens of thousands and a (meth)acryloyl group at one end thereof (called "macromer" or macromonomer"). They can easily provide a variety of graft polymers if they are copolymerized with vinyl monomers. For this reason, these graft polymers have been investigated and applied to the fields which require any particular combination of physical properties and functions such as a microphase separation structure, amphiphatic properties and interfacial activity, i.e., in the fields of adhesives, gluing agents, compatibilizing agents and medical materials.
On the other hand, it can be considered that reactive oligomers or polymers having a plurality of (meth)acryloyl groups in the molecular chains per se are used as photohardenable or thermosetting resins or that it is easy for imparting new functions or processability to these oligomers or polymers if they are simultaneously used with other resins and thus they would be anticipated as functional polymeric materials used in a variety of industrial applications.
The inventors of this invention have worked on the development of reactive oligomers or polymers of a new type having (meth)acryloyl groups in the molecule. As a result, the inventors have found out that reactive vinyl polymers having (meth)acryloyl groups on the side chains can easily be obtained by radical-copolymerizing certain kinds of monofunctional (meth)acrylates with polyfunctional (meth)acrylates under specific conditions in a solvent and thus have completed the present invention.